We know the bad news already. You see it wearing a tracksuit and pushing its
buggy down every high street, a look of benign resignation etched on faces
that still light up at Scooby-Doo cartoons. As tabloids compete to chase
down the nation's youngest mother, the headlines about teenage pregnancy are
obliged to shock and appal. Last year we had the 11-year-old who was
impregnated during a ”cannabis-fuelled romp”; in 2001 the DNA of five men
was tested to identify the father of a 12-year-old's baby. In May another
headline appeared, flagging a story at which we were meant to shake our
sorry heads. It announced that under a programme called the Nurse Family
Partnership, some pregnant teenagers were to be allocated a personal nurse
for the first two years of their baby's life, a state-sponsored ”family
friend” who, in the US version of the scheme, has meant fewer second
unwanted pregnancies, fewer injuries to children and decreased criminality
when they grow up. This first phase of the UK's pilot scheme, which might be
rolled out nationwide, would cost £7.5m at a time when cancer drugs are
subject to a postcode lottery. Listen carefully and you will hear the sound
of decent hands being wrung in despair.
Practitioners tasked with preventing teenage pregnancy claim we need statutory
sex education, better health services for young people, inspired local
”pregnancy co-ordinators”. Don't we also need to stop rewarding fecklessness
with benefits, picking up the bill for immorality and shoddy parenting? Is
your dander rising, your outrage simmering? Good. Now meet Coral Williams,
with her overflowing litter bin and her pretty, strained face, and ask who
could possibly need a helping hand more. Coral's mother is a crack addict,
currently in prison, who beat her with a horsewhip as a child, blaming her
for the death of Coral's father, who hanged himself before her birth. ”I
don't feel like I ever had a childhood,” she says, without self-pity.
Her aunt and uncle and her sister used heroin; she raised herself alone from
the age of nine until she contacted social services and asked to be taken
into care at 12. Her foster placements all broke down, too far from her home
town of Reading, too rural and unfamiliarly cosy. Last year, at 17, she gave
birth to Kacie, with no means of supporting herself or the chubby blonde 15-month-old
girl with pierced ears who ambles around their poky flat rented by social
services. Her boyfriend is 32 (and a father to three more children by two
other mothers) and was ”thrilled” by news of the pregnancy, while Coral was
”shell-shocked”. She had been having contraceptive injections but wanted to
give her body a rest and ”fell” pregnant — the term the girls use denotes a
momentary stumble, nobody's fault — and the morning-after pill failed. She
was not one of those who plan a baby to steer their lives in another
direction; she is one of those who just let it happen.
She was studying child development at Thames Valley University with a view to
becoming a nursery nurse, a course she gave up when her baby was eight
months old, not wanting strangers to care for her. But what now? The Nurse
Family Partnership scheme, aimed at deprived young mothers and which would
have started 16 weeks into Coral's pregnancy, might have been just the thing
to make a difference. Based on the idea that pregnancy and childbirth
present a window of responsiveness in young women who might normally reject
offers of help, US trials suggest that the nurse — visiting no more than
once a week — could have had a dramatic impact on Coral's wellbeing and
Kacie's readiness for school, subsequent education and prospects of escaping
deprivation.
On her own Coral seems vulnerable, isolated, broke; surely having a baby in
her circumstances is the worst disaster that could have befallen her? Later
I will question this judgment, but my first reaction to her is concern and,
to be honest, horror. Before we start willing Coral to get a grip and start
making carrot purée in freezable portions, however, we should know that she
has other problems. After her telephone call to the police during a domestic
row — ”My boyfriend just wouldn't leave, nothing worse” — Kacie has been
placed on the local child-protection register, a measure Coral's social
worker had wanted after the birth, though Coral's mothering instincts had
won her round. Coral is furious and indignant about the measure but, on the
day we meet at least, mostly deflated by what she sees as the unfairness of
it all. ”I know that I'm just another statistic, but I love my daughter,”
she says. ”I would never hurt her.”
In England approximately 39,000 girls under 18 become pregnant every year, of
whom half have abortions. In affluent areas research shows that
three-quarters of teenage pregnancies are terminated, as opposed to less
than one-fifth
in poor neighbourhoods. There is much squabbling over how well or badly we are
doing in countering the trend. The government's Teenage Pregnancy Strategy
was launched in 1999, aiming, unrealistically, to halve the rate by 2010. So
far it claims only an 11.15% reduction. Other voices — especially shrill ones
in the Daily Mail — point to a rise in numbers at different times. We have
the highest rates of teenage pregnancy in Europe, a ”shameful record” in the
words of Tony Blair. But we should beware the stereotyping.
Sometimes young motherhood confers a startling maturity. When I visit
17-year-old Aimee Horswill in Glossop, Derbyshire, we walk past a pub
outside which a group of young mums sit in the sunshine with their babies.
Aimee is no paragon of virtue: she used to skip school, was in an abusive
relationship, living away from home at 14, but she wouldn't consider joining
the pub crowd. She has recently moved here and needs to make new friends for
herself and her 18-month-old daughter, Ella-Mai, but she has standards. ”It
doesn't look nice, babies outside a pub. It's not right.” Strikingly
beautiful, Aimee's delicacy belies her strength of character. She tells me
that local housing officers are sick of her demands that they do better for
her child. She moved here from Nunhead, south London, last year, following
her mother, to make a fresh start away from the tough streets and schools to
which she ”wouldn't dream” of sending her precious daughter. Ella attends a
local nursery, funded by the government's Care to Learn scheme, when Aimee
is studying hairdressing at a local college with a view to working
eventually in special-effects hair and make-up (her father is a model-maker
for movies). Ella-Mai's father, Triac, an upbeat young man who has overcome
his own troubled background, is training to be a store detective and has
applied to join the police.
They are a polite, proud, hard-working couple, their little council house
newly painted, its wooden bathroom floors sanded to eradicate the stench of
urine bequeathed by a former tenant. Aimee became pregnant at 15. She took
her pill in a haphazard, ”childish” way, she says, there wasn't much sex
education at her inner-London schools and she was too embarrassed to listen
when her mum broached the subject. ”As a mother now, I want Ella and I to
discuss everything. I don't want her to be a young mother. Even when she's
17, I'll be asking to meet any boy she's even thinking of seeing. I'm going
to be much stricter than my parents, because I know what young people are
getting away with out there.”
Once reconciled to the idea of motherhood (her dad was initially furious; she
was unsure; Triac said whatever she decided was fine by him), she set about
doing it her way. Her parents have consistently offered help, but she is an
independent spirit, opting for a home birth with a birthing pool, scented
candles and no pain relief. Her mother was not allowed to attend. ”I wanted
it to be a special moment for Triac and me. I'll never forget his laugh when
she arrived, a sort of cry of happiness.” Aimee and their baby moved into
the downstairs of her mother's Victorian house. ”It hasn't been a real
struggle for me,” she smiles. ”
I'm lucky to have family help and a lovely boyfriend.” Few maternal duties
were delegated. ”I didn't want my mum to take over. It was my baby and I
wanted to do it my way.” The only pupil who had ever returned to Pimlico
School to sit GCSEs after a baby was born (Triac brought Ella-Mai in for
regular feeds), Aimee makes her teenage pregnancy seem like part of an
enduring love story rather than a social crisis. She believes having a baby
at 15 is irresponsible, however. ”I'd rather have done it later. The best
age to have a baby is 27.”
Coral and Aimee were two of the girls chosen by the photographer Tina Stallard
for her study of pregnant teenagers in Reading and London last year, an
attempt to explore the fragile margins between childhood and motherhood.
Their dilemma is one of being trapped, so young, so cocooned, at the centre
of a moral panic. Stallard's images also reveal the unsuppressible beauty of
her subjects. The dewy skin of the mothers and the freshness of their regard
after the shock of labour and birth, seem childlike in themselves, somehow
innocent no matter how rackety their teenage years have been. We see them in
gritty TV documentaries, chavs with face-lifting ponytails and Vicky Pollard
voices, but step closer and you will also find maternal devotion and
self-sacrifice. Should we disapprove of them with quite such distaste?
Teenage pregnancy costs the NHS £63m, and if a young mother isn't in work or
training for the first three years of her child's life, she will cost
£19,000-25,000, the government estimates, apart from housing benefits, for
which no figures are published. But aren't the choices made by older mothers
also dubious? As women delay motherhood, reassured by the promise of IVF in
their forties, encouraged to freeze eggs and embryos, older mothers are
responsible for what has been called an ”infertility time bomb” that will
send our declining birth rate plummeting further. Their medical
complications — prematurity, for instance — are a drain on the NHS and
similar to those associated with teenage pregnancies. Yet, tellingly, nobody
has bothered to calculate the cost of middle-aged maternity.
In the first half of the last century, young motherhood was unremarkable, but
then so was young marriage; a hundred years ago couples started families
young because infant mortality among the poor meant you needed a brood as an
insurance policy, and women's life expectancy was short. That has gone, but
the sense of omnipotent fertility with which we have replaced it, the faith
that science will prevail over renegade biology, means that many women end
up swamped in sorrow, having missed their chance. Most of those women would
have preferred condemnation as girls to childlessness as pensioners.
At my own school 30 years ago, there were two teenage pregnancies, both
massive scandals; one of the girls ran away out of fear and shame, the other
delivered a baby in the downstairs loo of her home on a junior executive
estate; the first her mother knew was a newborn's cry emerging from the
avocado suite. For weeks we classmates walked around morbidly pondering the
gory details, half-horrified, half-thrilled by the sheer badness of it, but
such cases were rare. In the intervening decades, teenage mothers have come
to represent a moral decline, maybe bequeathed by the 1960s and its
dismissal of the stigma that once kept wayward lusts in check and
back-street abortionists in business. Teenage mothers are today assumed to
be scrounging grants and council flats, harming their own prospects and
blighting the lives of their children born into an unbreakable cycle of
deprivation. The chaos of their lives terrifies us. Might it be catching?
Aimee tells me of a girl who had a baby at 15, quickly adopted by her own
mother, a subsequent pregnancy that ended in termination, and another after
that. I ask her if, in such a case, financial assistance and housing should
only be offered on the undertaking of long-term contraceptive implants or
injections. ”Oh yes,” Aimee says, ”that could be a way of
stopping it.” A policy-maker in the area tells me that the battle is to keep
at-risk girls unimpregnated until the first baby is two years old, the
sapping energy of a toddler making the prospect of another baby far more
daunting. Good grief, I hear myself saying, can we only deter them one child
down the line?
Is it the age of these mothers we object to, or their sexual habits, their
blokes, their welfare-dependent lifestyles? Imagine them transposed to a
Home Counties setting, in which the privately educated daughter of lawyers,
say, got pregnant at 15 and, with support from parents, is bringing up her
child to pass exams and surrender its seat on the bus to its elders. How
much less irritated do we feel by this girl? Would we fear for her child?
Not in the least. What we would see is an unfortunate but not
life-shattering mistake; except that we would probably see nothing at all,
since the middle-class teenager is far more likely to have a termination,
arranged and hushed up by mortified parents, than a girl from a deprived
area. The aristocratic or literary version of the teenage mum, meanwhile,
moves beyond merely acceptable to desirably romantic; think of Jane Clark,
barefoot and pregnant in Saltwood Castle, or the novelist Lisa St Aubin de
Teran, seduced by an aristocratic Venezuelan bank-robber at 16, creatures
from a fairy tale rather than a sink estate.
There is little glamour in the life of Jade Lewendon, who lives in a tower
block in a small flat with her father, who works at a Reading brewery. He is
asleep next door while we talk, having worked a night shift; in the kitchen
making a cup of tea is her asylum-seeker boyfriend, Lexis, 19, the father of
her 16-month-old son, Leo. Jade is plump, with amazingly clear eyes and a
benign look of contentment in the face of what others would deem constrained
circumstances. This is the tricky paradox in the nanny state's attempt to
deter young girls by stressing the hardships of teenage mothering: you might
successfully warn against drugs and booze by having addicts testify to their
torment, but single mums seem unhelpfully happy. None of these girls
expresses regrets; asked if they would opt to have the same children 10
years later, at 25, say, half of them look at you as if you are mad.
Jade's own parents split up when she was four, and she has known hardship; she
came to live with her father when her mother, temporarily homeless, was
sleeping in her car, but family is what she treasures. Her baby is calm and
sweet, watching Postman Pat on a wide television; 500 guests are expected at
his christening party; the walls of the flat are hung with snaps of seaside
outings and Christmas dinners with paper hats. How has the arrival of her
son changed her? ”You get up when they do,” she shrugs. By her own account,
Jade was a tough cookie, expelled from school at 14 after a fight in which a
teacher's arm ”was pushed”, which was classed as assault. ”I'm happier now,”
she continues. ”I used to fight a lot. I was in trouble with police. Now I
prefer to stay in. Leo has given me a focus.”
Is Leo missing out because of her age? ”No,” she laughs. ”I'm a patient mum.
He has every toy going. I spent £200 on him at Christmas. He got a hand-held
console, a baby PlayStation, a walker, a swing.” As she lists the treats she
shouldn't be able to afford, I think of the wealthy mothers I know whose
children get vile carob Easter eggs and circle the park on tasteful wooden
scooters, enviously eyeing the gaudy Thomas the Tank Engine versions
considered too vulgar. Statistics tell us that little Leo will be
disadvantaged socially and educationally; what they don't forecast is that
he will also be blithely secure in the cosily feathered nest of his
disadvantage.
Lexis, a Liberian, is not allowed to work, so the family live carefully with
income support, housing benefit, child benefit, and the help of Jade's
father, who pays the bills and buys their food. ”I get £53 a week. I'm not a
burden on society. It's my dad that helps me.” A quick glance at Jade might
confirm your prejudices: she seems complacent; she didn't breast-feed; she
has no burning ambition for independence, though there is a plan to design
”websites from home” after A-levels. Yet she is also remarkable in her
selflessness. Most teenage girls are self-absorbed, stressing about skinny
jeans and boyfriends with cars, while none of the young mothers I met
worried about much except their children.
Now come with me across town to meet the Honors of Reading. Mum and Dad are
Tracey and Paul; she, attractive and warm; he, kind-hearted, a grafter, a
local youth football coach. Their life is run — overrun, actually — by
babies. Their son Stephan (from Tracey's first marriage) got his girlfriend,
Sarah, pregnant at 13 with their son, Cody, now two. Their daughter Sophie,
18, is the mother of Chardonnay, now 18 months. Their younger daughter,
Carly, a pretty, softly spoken girl who opens the door to me today, had her
baby, Riley, at 15. The stark facts make them sound like guests on The
Jeremy Kyle Show, inhabitants of a latter-day provincial Gin Alley littered
with Asbos, daytime telly and morning spliffs. This could not be further
from the truth. The Honor house is pretty and — considering the number of
infants to which it plays host — miraculously tidy, the siblings mutually
helpful, the parents involved and loving to a fault.
Carly was 14 when she found out she was five months pregnant at a scan with
her mother by her side; her periods hadn't stopped and she ascribed her
burgeoning tummy to overeating.
It was too late for an abortion. ”My parents weren't cool. They were like,
’Not again!’ I heard my dad shouting when my mum told him, while they were
making the packed lunches in the morning. But by the time he got home from
work he was just thinking about what they could do to help me. They bought
everything for Riley, which made me ashamed. Because I was under 16, I only
had £17 a week, and it wasn't enough for milk, nappies and clothes.”
Despite the examples of her older siblings, parental warnings and sex
education, Carly was not using contraception. Her mother had given her the
pill, but later found the tablets unused in her bedroom. ”By the time I was
making her swallow them,” says Tracey, ”she was already pregnant.” Carly
smiles: ”I just never thought it would happen.” When it did, she had no real
worries. ”I always knew my mum and dad would help me. They never blamed me.
If they were disappointed, they kept it to themselves.”
Riley's father is boyfriend Ricky, of whom her parents didn't once approve.
Since spending seven months in Huntercombe prison for burglary, however, he
has apparently turned a corner, is doing a bricklaying course, and living
nearby until they can move into a little house courtesy of her father. Carly
is back at school, Riley's term-time nursery place funded by the
government's Care to Learn scheme. Was it a good move to get pregnant so
young? ”I would say yes, because I'm okay.”
Indeed. It is not the young mothers or their obviously thriving babies one
worries about here, but the self-sacrificing parents who (when they have
time off from converting garages to spare bedrooms and doing overtime to buy
and renovate properties for their fertile brood) berate themselves for their
failure. ”We feel we've let them down,” says Tracey with a sigh. ”I should
have drummed it into them harder, they should have had a career before
having babies.”
At her wits' end, Tracey has considered, and dismissed, putting Chelsea, her
youngest daughter, now eight, on the pill as soon as her periods start, or
simply never letting her out on her own. But why should she suffer because
of the others? I say to her, ”Look at these with babies. I know it looks
nice but you need to get a career.” None of the older girls liked school;
Sophie's aversion was diagnosed as phobic; Carly truanted persistently. At
17 Sarah has no GCSEs and shows no ambition apart from vaguely wanting to be
a chef, having found hairdressing ”boring”.
The Honors make you rethink the easy opinions about teenage pregnancy, and
also the complex scientific ones. The ”psychosocial theory” that suggests
young girls reach menarche earlier when there is family stress, and start
their sexual activity younger when the father is absent, obviously doesn't
apply here. More generally, this family is not poor or marginalised; its
elders are clear moral role models, committed to their marriage. So what do
we conclude? Maybe that too much love and tolerance is to blame in this
child-centred version of parenthood, awash with compassion and short on
censure. This is a view of the modern family as an all-accepting refuge, not
a place where you learn life's rules, but where you are protected when you
have broken them. What if Carly's parents had warned her never to darken
their door with another underage pregnancy? She giggles. ”How could anyone
do that to their kids?” You can see why Stephan's girlfriend, Sarah, whose
childhood was bleak, loves being attached to this happy brood. A baby-faced
tomboy in a tracksuit, Sarah was sexually active at 12 and pregnant with
Cody at 13. Was that right, I ask? ”I don't care!” she shoots back. ”I don't
care what people say or think.” Did anyone criticise her?
”A couple of people. No-one in authority.” Why is it such a big deal, she
asks, when young girls get pregnant? Because society needs you to work and
contribute, I say. People pay for her income support and nursery places with
their taxes. ”But I'll pay it back by working later and paying my taxes,”
Carly chips in, stung by this rare rebuke.
Later I ask Gill Frances, chair of the Advisory Group of Teenage Pregnancy, if
we are now beyond telling girls it is wrong to have sex at 12. She hesitates
slightly. ”’Wrong' is maybe not the best way to say it. It's not good for
their bodies, or their babies.” Indeed, the babies of young mothers are 60%
more likely to die at birth.
Some women are born to be mothers, whatever their age. Nikki Abbey, 20, is one
of them. When I arrive at her ground-floor housing association flat,
three-year-old Connor is busy at his little crafts table making Play-Doh
scrambled eggs for everyone, moving onto a maths game, clearly
button-bright, loving, adored, never once whining for sweets or television.
Nikki is calm and nurturing without trying. She had Connor at 16, the
product of a short relationship with a boyfriend who was keen to become a
father. ”I didn't want a baby,” she says, ”because I was in the sixth form
but he kept asking me, so I agreed after a month. I was naive. He didn't
want to be with me once I was pregnant. He just wanted a baby.”
For Connor's first 10 months she lived at her mother's house. She wanted to
stay at school, but Connor's father objected to him being cared for in the
crèche there, so Nikki left. Being over 16, she was able to apply for income
support (£400 a month) and received a £500 grant to buy the more expensive
essentials like a buggy. Times were tough, but so was she: she applied for a
flat, furnished it with the help of family and friends, and met her
boyfriend, Daniel, a travel agent and prizewinning snooker ace, with whom
she now has baby Cadan. Daniel supports them and, with a CSA contribution,
Nikki no longer claims benefits. She is brimming with the future, planning
to become a support worker at her local hospital, and when we meet is about
to move into the house she and Daniel are buying. A founder of the
mother-and-baby unit at Ranikhet school, she was once painfully shy, but has
found her voice and her métier in caring for children.
Nikki's story reminds you that two factors transform the lives of these girls:
their mothers and their men. Nikki struck lucky on both counts; others are
fortunate to score one of the two. It is depressing to consider young lives
for which babies are the beginning and end of aspiration. All the girls say
they will go on to qualify and work, but how much higher could they have
aimed without babies to distract
them? Teenage mothers are 20% more likely to have no qualifications at 30 than
those giving birth at 24 or older, and 22% more likely to be living in
poverty. Even the ones who strive and succeed will always ”be playing
catch-up with their peers”, according to one former teenage mum. When
contemporaries are buying that foot-on-the-ladder first studio flat, they will
need — but won't be able to afford — a two-bedroom property, so will be more
likely to remain in social housing. Then there's the benefits trap. To
compensate for available state help, they would need a job with a starting salary
of around £20,000 — and remember, none of these girls shone at
school, let alone aspired to a stellar career.
For the poorest, ironically, the arrival of a baby makes least difference. The
death of social mobility under successive governments means it probably
doesn't matter whether they have a baby at 14 or 24. New research by the
educational charity the Sutton Trust has found that children born in the
1950s had a better chance of escaping poverty than those born in 1970, that
children as young as three are slipping behind, and that schools are no
longer the catalysts for self-betterment we once hoped they were. Without
the prospect of meaningful rewards — interesting job, good money, a step up
the ladder — why would they wait to have a child?
For a girl like Coral, motherhood is a solution where there are no others;
it's not her child that holds her back, it is her grisly history. What's the
point of asking such young women if they think they ought to have
unprotected, underage sex when there is no moral order in their universe?
The miracle is Coral's instinctive kindness to her daughter after the
agonising abuse she herself suffered. Without Kacie, would Coral now be
swotting for A-levels and planning a shiny career in the media? Hardly. The
better question is: how much more hopeless would she feel without this child
who returns an unconditional love of which nobody has ever deemed her
worthy?
A few months ago I would have automatically assumed a beleaguered girl like
this to be an unfit mother, her child better off elsewhere. The informed
picture is more complex, and now I am far less sure. ”Kacie has given me
something to live for,” she says. ”Before I had nothing. I never let anyone
close. I had no plans, no discipline, no-one to tell me what to do, or guide
me.” How can it be that I am pleased that Coral has her daughter, a
blameless child born into cramped, penurious, uncertain beginnings, but also
into love? Because with Kacie, chewing purposefully on a dog-eared toy and
whining with teething pains, her mother nurtures at least a hope of making a
life, and even a second-chance childhood, for both of them.
